


Someone To Listen (To Stories I Tell)

by echoist



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, castielfest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-09
Updated: 2010-08-09
Packaged: 2017-10-11 00:35:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/106290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/echoist/pseuds/echoist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for <a href="http://community.livejournal.com/castielfest/">Castielfest</a> @ LJ, from <a href="http://morganoconner.livejournal.com/">morganoconner's</a> prompt "Post 5.22, Castiel hears Dean praying to him while he's back in Heaven."  I really hope it's what you wanted, and I didn't mangle your prompt too badly!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Someone To Listen (To Stories I Tell)

The first time was an accident.  The blazing July heat had seeped into the pavement, radiating back up in waves though the sun had long since set.  Dean sat in a borrowed lawn chair next to the Impala, listening to the excited shouts of amazement from the crowded lot as the local fireworks extravaganza took flight.  Ben chimed in from his perch on the car’s roof, exclamations of “awesome!” and “friggin’ sweet!” muffled by the handful of popcorn in his mouth. 

Lisa stood a few feet away in a gaggle of soccer – well, no, baseball moms, if you wanted to get technical.  Even they fell silent watching thousands of red and gold sparks trailing across the night sky, leaving plumes of smoke in their wake.  Fireworks always made Dean think of Sam, had even when his brother was still a foot away in the passenger seat, instead of riding shotgun with the Devil. 

“You should be here, man,” he said aloud, voice too low to carry above the echoing peals of pyrotechnic thunder.  The grand finale wheeled and spun overhead, and wherever Sam might be, it was too far away to hear.  Dean wondered, conversely, what fireworks might look like from Heaven, if the atmosphere was down or up or sideways from an angel’s perspective and laughed.  It didn’t matter.  No angels were watching.

_I would have been grateful for that, six months ago_, Dean thought, downing the last of his beer.  Tonight, he would have given anything to sit on the Impala’s hood and have a beer with someone who didn’t feel like a stranger.  Someone who understood that this was not just another summer, not just another excuse to light up the night sky with gunpowder and chemistry.  Someone who remembered how close the world had come to going up in smoke like so many roman candles. 

“Independence Day,” he muttered into the empty bottle.  “They don’t have a freaking clue, do they, Cas?”  A meteor tumbled to earth as somewhere, an angel agreed, searing the sky in a thin, white line.

 

 

Dean had lost his fourth job in three months when it happened again.  The garage was twenty minutes away from Lisa’s house, and he drove past the driveway twice before finding the guts to park.  Ben wouldn’t be home from school for another few hours, and Lisa taught back to back classes until five.  It would only take ten minutes to pack his bag.

He threw his oil-stained shirt in the trash on his way to the sink,  scrubbing at the thick layer of grease that coated his hands.  Dean’s knuckles were raw and bloodied, nails scraped down to the quick before he finished, staring down into a bubbling mass of iridescent grey sludge.  Leaning back against the counter, he pulled out his wallet and thumbed through a narrow wedge of crumpled bills.  It would buy gas for a couple of days, if he was lucky. 

Dean’s fingers brushed past a heavier piece of stock behind the bills, folded up and jammed into the corner.  He pulled it free, replacing the wallet in his pocket and laying the photo on the butcher’s block to smooth out the wrinkles.  Bobby had burned the only copy he’d developed, but Sam had nicked the negative when he wasn’t looking and made three more.  One he’d tucked inside a book in Bobby’s library, figuring he might actually want it by the time he came across it.  Another he’d folded and tucked in Castiel’s trench coat without a word, leaving Dean to attempt to explain the relevance of photographs to humans.  The last he’d stashed in the Impala’s glove box, where Dean had found it three days after Lawrence and nearly torn it in half. 

Instead, he’d folded it up and stashed it in his wallet and managed to forget about it, until now.  Another life stared back at Dean in grainy black and white; six pairs of eyes to witness his latest failure.  Well, more like five pairs, really; it was anyone’s guess what Bobby was looking at, but it sure as hell wasn’t the camera.  Three pairs of eyes he would never see again. 

Dean sank to the floor and leaned back against the cabinets, wondering about the fourth.  “I tried,” he muttered under his breath, not entirely certain who he was talking to.  “I’m just not cut out for this white picket fence bullshit and you know it.”  Everything would make more sense once he was back out on the road.  Waking up in the same bed every day, hanging your clothes up in the same closet, backing out from the same driveway on your way to the same damn place five days in a row – it just wasn’t normal.  Dean never had figured out how millions of people lived out the same suffocating routine over and over again, every year of their lives.

“I can’t do it, Cas,” he told the angel in the photograph, having long ago passed the point where that thought would have registered as odd.  “Just not my style, you know?  I guess I thought, sticking around in one place, I might be pretty easy to find.  Predictable.  In case anyone ever felt like dropping by for a beer or whatever.  Guess not, though.  Hell, these guys won’t even miss me when I’m gone.  Probably be relieved.

“Listen, man, from here on out, if you want to find me, you’re just going to have to suck it up and call like everybody else.”  Dean laughed, dry and hoarse. “ ’Cause my time’s really in demand these days and I got someplace to be.”         




He was halfway to the closet where he’d stashed his duffle bags when the doorknob rattled behind him.  Dean turned to see Ben bursting through the front hall, face flushed and grinning from ear to ear.  “What are you doing home from school so early?” Dean asked as Ben tossed his backpack on the couch.

“Half day,” Ben answered cheerfully, still breathless after the sprint back home from the bus stop.  “There was some kind of funny smell in the air vents, so they let us go early.”  Dean blinked and did not think about crocattas or rawheads or anything else that might stink like the dead and hide in small, dark places.  “But listen,  it’s really awesome that you’ve got the day off,” Ben continued, “ ‘cause they’ve got a Godzilla double-feature at the Cineplex!”

Dean laughed.  “Everything has a bright side for you, doesn’t it, kid?” he asked, brushing his hands against his jeans to hide the blood. 

Ben tilted his head to one side, hands on his hips, unconsciously mimicking his mother’s favorite stance.  “Dude,” he observed.  “It’s Godzilla.  What’s not to like?” 

“Can’t argue with that,” Dean agreed, folding the photograph in quarters before shoving it in his back pocket.  No one would blame him for delaying his travel plans until he made sure Godzilla beat Mothra for the twenty third time.

 

 

The next time was a dream, and Dean was fairly certain he couldn’t be blamed for that.  You know, if anyone was keeping track of his subtle and mostly unintentional habit of blasphemy.  It had been business as usual with Sam - finish up the job, salt and burn and sprint for the Impala, before the feds caught up.  It was always someone, even in his dreams; a coven of witches, a pack of demons or the entire Ladies’ Rotary Club of Truth-Or-Consequences, New Mexico.  Dean slammed the driver’s side door behind him with a resounding crack, heard the echo of the passenger door closing just in time as he peeled out of the gravel lot. 

“Man, oh, man,” he sighed, hands tapping out a Stevie Ray Vaughn baseline on the steering wheel.  “We are two lucky bastards, Sammy, you know that?”  He glanced to the side, expecting to see a grin mirrored on his brother’s face, mingled with Sam’s usual disbelief at their own survival.  What he saw instead nearly made him plow the Impala into a ditch.  The passenger seat was empty.

“What the hell?” Dean shouted, glancing over his shoulder into the backseat.  “Sam?  Sammy?”  He staggered out of the car, staring bewildered into the night.  The sound of sirens had faded away, and the highway seemed to stretch on forever in each direction, vanishing into the darkness.  He fumbled with his cell phone, dialed Sam’s number, and listened as it rang. 

No answer.  _Help_, Dean thought, shot through with terror and adrenaline.  He stalked a circle around the Impala, glanced beneath the undercarriage, stared out into shadows so thick he could almost taste them.   _I don’t ask for much, you know I don’t, but this – I can’t -_  He turned around twice, dragging a hand through his hair in frustration._  Not Sam.  Anything but Sam.  For God’s sake, somebody _help_ me!_

A hand fell heavy on his shoulder and Dean jumped, gun raised to chest height, a solid half pound of pressure already on the trigger.  It wasn’t Sam’s hand; it was narrow and bony and the fingernails were ragged.  Sam had always been such a girl about that, he never would have bitten them off like – well, like Dean always did.  Castiel gently pushed the weapon down, wrapped long fingers around Dean’s hold on the grip and eased it out of his hand. 

“A gun is unnecessary in this situation,” he offered, staring through Dean with his accustomed hundred-yard stare. 

“I left him behind, Cas.”  The words tumbled out from Dean’s mouth like weights, crashing against the silence.  “I left Sam in that graveyard, and he’s gonna get caught, and the Feds are gonna lock him away.  How could I do that?  How could I just leave my brother behind?”

Dean noticed his shoulders were shaking at about the same time he realized that Castiel had wrapped his skinny arms around them in the world’s most awkward hug.  Any other time, any other place he might have been pissed, would have shrugged it off with a forced laugh and tried once again to educate the bastard on the concept of personal space.  Tonight though, on the side of an endless highway running through Dean Winchester’s own personal Hell, he decided he’d rather have the company.  There would be plenty of time to be embarrassed later, when he’d found Sam.  

“You did not abandon your brother, Dean.”  Castiel reassured him.  Stiff, starched fabric brushed across his cheek as Dean relaxed, resting his forehead against the angel’s shoulder.  Bony fingers brushed along his neck and traveled up his scalp, sending a half-unpleasant shiver down his spine.  “Sam made his choice.  It was terrible, and brave, and we must respect that.”

Dean was silent for a long moment before pulling away, hands jammed in the pockets of his father’s worn leather jacket.  “I don’t know what this ‘we’ business is all about,” he muttered, turning half to one side.  “You know, I haven’t even heard from you in six months.  Nada.  First Sam, and then – and then you just flap your wings and disappear on me?”  One booted toe scuffed a line in the gravel beside the rear tire.  “That was a dick move, and you know it. So don’t say ‘we’ have to do anything, Cas, ‘cause you bailed.”    




“I’m here now,” Cas offered, tone steady and unruffled by Dean’s accusations.  He reached out across the short distance, ruffling Dean’s hair in a clumsy mimicry of childish Winchester affection.  A lifetime of memories rose up in Dean’s chest at the contact, spooked and fearful and ready to bolt.  He blinked, and the angel was gone, leaving only the Impala to keep watch in the silent, unending dark.

Dean sat up, sheets a rumpled mess, pillow lying forgotten on the floor beside the bed.  Lisa snored gently beside him, face pressed into the paperback she’d fallen asleep reading.  Dean pried it loose from her fingers and settled the covers around her before slipping silently from the room, too weary from dreaming to sleep.

For weeks, he thought he could hear the slight rustle of wings between every step, waking or sleeping and once, briefly, he even stopped to listen.  

 

The last time was different, because everything had changed.  It was nearly four a.m. on the last night of the year when the house shook, just rattled and rocked on its foundations like a cornered animal and left Sam Winchester, scraped raw and bloody, across the front steps in its wake.  Dean stopped and stared through the broken front window, hands pressed hard against the lintels where he’d ridden out the quake.  Indiana didn’t have earthquakes.  Until a few moments ago, Indiana hadn’t had Sam fucking Winchester, either.

“Sam?” Dean whispered, the name ringing in his ears like a shout.  His brother didn’t make a sound, just laid there like a broken toy.  It took fifteen minutes to drag him inside, find him some clothes that barely fit his sasquatch frame and get him laid out on the bed where Dean thought he might be comfortable.  A trail of blood and what looked like ashes led from the front door into the bathroom where he’d managed to wipe some of the grime from his brother’s skin; Lisa would shit a brick whenever she got around to coming home.  Dean supposed New Year’s Eve was a pretty serious party night for most people.  Normal people.  He was grateful Ben was spending the night with some friends down the block.  He wouldn’t have had the first clue where to start explaining.   

Back to business as usual, then, Winchester style.

Sam’s injuries seemed superficial, but he was only barely conscious and kept repeating the same thing over and over again.  “Fire,” he gasped between breaths and the cups of water Dean was pouring down his throat.  “It was on fire.”  _Hell_, Dean figured, not wanting to ask for specifics, until Sam clarified.  “The angel was on fire but it didn’t burn.”

“An angel pulled you out of Hell?” Dean asked, wrapping a blanket around Sam where he huddled and shivered against the mattress.  Right then, he didn’t care if a team of trained circus elephants had dragged his brother out of the Pit, and he wasn’t about to question the sudden good luck.  Not when it was Sam.  And it _was_ Sam, he told himself, over and over to banish any doubts he might have had on that score.  It was _Sam_, and that was that. 

“You never told me, Dean,” Sam muttered, coughing up a wet, black mass onto Lisa’s favorite pillowcase.  Dean wiped it away with a towel and figured it was a good thing he still had a bag packed, ready and waiting.  “It was so cold down there.  Cold, and wet, and empty and I thought – I thought I’d never –“

“It wasn’t like that for me, Sammy,” Dean responded quietly when his brother trailed off, glazed eyes seeing another world.  “Figure it’s a little different for everybody, like Heaven, you know?  Nothing I could have told you would have helped any in the long run.”

Sam gripped his wrist, hard, and Dean felt bones slide together beneath his brother’s fingers.  “No,” he wheezed.  “Not about Hell.  About _angels_.”  His eyes slid shut, limbs going limp against the sheets and Dean spent the next three days pacing the floor around the bed.  It was a week before Sam could walk on his own, but the day after that they were both in the car and on the road.  Back to business.  Back to doing what they did best.

Lisa looked disappointed and relieved at the same time, standing in the doorway to watch them leave.

Inside the motel room, Sam slept like the dead.  Dean paced, watching the parking lot begin to fill with water and floating debris.  Rain seeped in through cracks in the stucco to drip, lazy and disorganized, down the faded wallpaper.  At least they were on the second story, Dean thought, muttering something about small favors as he turned the single chair around to rest his arms across the back.  If it flooded this high, they had bigger problems than one catatonic escapee from Hell and a deadbeat loser were likely to solve tonight. 

The small television set crackled its way through the weather report, projecting the east-bound path of an angry red eye.  It flickered like ghost light in the late afternoon gloom.  _Figures_, Dean thought.  _Right in the path of a goddamn hurricane.  Where else would we end up?  _He rocked forward on two rickety legs while the wind shook tiles loose from the roof, each gust a retort to an argument Dean couldn’t quite follow.  He’d driven about as far as he could go in one direction, and the weather hadn’t yet tired of one-upping its own stalker act; Dean didn’t think their luck was likely to improve when he headed back northwest. 

_You never told me, Dean.  _Sam’s voice seemed to echo through the room, drowning out the wind._  About angels._  Truth was, Dean thought, you spend so much time with one, all wrapped up its meatsuit Sunday best, you forget what they really are.  You forget the smooth, featureless gaze, the wheels within wheels rumbling through the darkness.  You forget the fire, and the wings that held back a hail of brimstone as they pulled you free.  You remember in its place a clumsy and awkward man in a rumpled suit.  A friend who always said the wrong thing and still managed to be right.

Dean used to think his version of the truth was the right one, or at least, the important one.  After Lawrence, he remembered that angels had other places to be, and better things to do.  Since Sam came back, he’d remembered the fire and the sword. 

A sturdy palm leaf the size of a retriever struck the window just behind him, rattling the glass in its frame.  Disentangling himself from the chair where it had tipped and sent him sprawling at the sudden sound, Dean decided to take his chances outside with the overzealous tropical breeze.  Anything would feel better than being cramped in the small, dark room, waiting for his brother to wake up.  Waiting for him to be Sam again.  To complain about the weather, to want to go get some freaking hippie salad, anything –

Even a goddamned hurricane. 

Dean locked the door behind him and descended the sagging staircase, clinging to the wrought iron railing for support in the wind.  The motel looked like it had been a fancy art deco experiment back in the day, before being ignominiously gutted and subdivided into nightly rentals.  _Hell_, Dean thought, glancing past the overgrown courtyard to where several well-maintained, expensive automobiles sat next to rusted clunkers.  _They probably rent by the hour, too._ 

A neglected flagstone path led down to a deserted beach, the sand littered with debris.  Waves crashed against the shoreline in an angry rhythm as he fought the stinging wind.  “All right,” he yelled.  “I get it.  I pissed you off.  You mind telling me what the hell I did before you blow this whole state off the map?”

“It isn’t always about you, Dean,” a quiet voice answered evenly from somewhere over his shoulder.   Dean wondered for a moment how he could hear a damn thing over the palm trees playing nearby buildings like overgrown drum kits.  Then he remembered that all bets were off when it came to angels, especially this one.  He wasn’t sure how he had ever managed to forget.




“Oh, that’s rich,” he retorted, arms folded across his chest against the stinging rain.  “One of you black-winged bastards smacking me upside the head to remind me I’m not actually that important, after all.  Never expected anything less.”

“Are you upset that the Host at large is no longer concerned with your every movement, or is it that you think I am not?” Castel asked without inflection.  Dean dug a small hole in the sand at his feet and watched it fill with water.

“Been a while,” he tossed back after several moments, making a poor attempt at nonchalance.  Dean shoved his hands deep in his jacket pockets, the collar turned up against the wind.  Castiel tilted his head, seemingly unbothered by the sheets of driving rain that soaked through his coat and pooled about his wingtips.

“I don’t understand,” the angel said, spitting out a mouth of rainwater. “It would seem that we speak fairly often, but I have been known to – misinterpret your meaning in the past.”     




“Misinterpret - are you fucking kidding me?” Dean raised his head, shouting over the oncoming storm.  “I haven’t heard one word from you in nearly a year.  Not one.”

Castiel furrowed his brow, shoes squelching as he continued his march across the waterlogged sand.  “I have heard many words from you,” he countered.  “I believed I was responding in kind.  Were our … wires made to cross?” 

It took Dean a moment to process the angel’s fumbled idiom, and move on to the statement that came before.  “When did you _hear_ me?” he asked, voice too low and uncertain to carry over the wind.  “Before now, I mean.”  Castiel stopped a few feet away, still barely visible through the rain, and appeared to ponder the question.

“When Ben struck a small round object with a piece of wood, which I gathered was a cause for some celebration.  When you could not sleep, and sometimes when you woke.  When snow fell over colored lights, and once when the air was split with sound and fire.”  Castiel paused, the set of his jaw softening as he continued.  “When you blamed yourself for your brother’s choices.  When you were lost.”

Dean’s jaw worked, rain dripping from his chin.  Nothing Cas was saying made a damn bit of sense.  “How is that even possible?” he asked, wiping a curtain of rain out of his eyes.  The angel stepped forward, reducing any illusion of distance as his waterlogged suit filled Dean’s vision.  The rain ceased, all sound from wind and waves reduced to minor background noise as a familiar rustling filled his ears.  He’d been looking for a sign, and missed it.  He’d been looking for a reason to leave, and instead found one to stay.  Was that what Cas meant by “replying in kind?”

“I did not properly anticipate the repercussions of returning Sam to earth,” Castiel said, a single drop of rain slipping through the invisible barrier to land on his nose.  “I have been occupied for quite some time attempting to hold the weather in check.”

“Wait a minute,” Dean said.  “So these storms, they’re like omens?  That’s why we’re being chased around by freaking tornados and golf-ball sized hail?”

“Samuel is no longer part of the natural order,” Castiel explained, as if people said that kind of thing every day.  “When I carried you out from Hell, there was very little left of your original body, and so I remade you as you had been before.  Being Lucifer’s vessel, Sam still carries much of the prison with him, and your world has reacted accordingly.”

Dean really, really wished that didn’t make sense.  “So you were the one who brought Sam back, huh?”  Castiel made a sound embarrassingly close to a snort and Dean could almost hear Bobby’s standard retort in the following silence.  _You idjit._ 

“He did not crawl out on his own,” Castiel answered, and Dean thought he might have caught the flicker of a smile.  “I was working on a more – elegant –  solution, but the demands of keeping Heaven in order had prevented me from executing it.  When I realized how much his absence was affecting you, I –“

“What, have I been broadcasting on Angel Radio without knowing it?” Dean asked, sounding affronted.  Castiel smirked – actually crooked up the corner of his mouth and full-on smirked, the know-it-all jerk. 

“It’s called prayer, Dean.” 

Dean stared, blinking leftover drops of rain from his eyes.  “What?  No, I don’t pray.”

Castiel turned his head to stare out into the gulf.  “I believe this storm has been sufficiently reigned in for the time being.  Perhaps, since you aren’t inclined to prayer, you would prefer to accompany me indoors?”

“We’re in the middle of a hurricane and you want to talk?” Dean threw back in disbelief.

“We have never stopped talking, Dean,” Castiel corrected. “And this is not a hurricane, merely what your atmospheric prophets would classify as a tropical storm.  While the system is receding, I would prefer to continue this portion of the conversation in a more suitable location.”  He shifted his weight on the unstable ground.  “My shoes are wet.”

“There’s a diner up the road that makes great Key Lime pie,” Dean suggested, nodding his head back towards the highway.  He tried to remember a time when conversations like these hadn’t been normal, and gave up.  “That is, if you don’t have any Heavenly bar brawls to sort out right now.” 

Castiel tilted his head as though listening to a distant voice and Dean resisted the urge to cover his face with his palm.  “No,” he responded after a moment.  “I do not believe any arguments currently require mediation.”  The rustle and scrape of unseen feathers filled Dean’s ears and he felt the light patter of rain return across his shoulders.  The levels on which he was actively _not_ thinking about Castiel’s version of an umbrella were many and vast and very important to his continued sanity.

“If any disputes should arise,” Castiel added, heading back up the path towards the parking lot, “they will simply have to wait.”

Dean remembered a sign hanging on a door at the old Roadhouse and smiled, jogging to catch up.  “The Sheriff’s off-duty?” he questioned, wondering what Dr. Badass was up to in Heaven these days. 

“Some duties supersede others in importance,” Castiel replied without looking back.  “I have decided that Key Lime pie is one of them.”


End file.
